Eighteen year-old Zach Curtis has lost everything: his girlfriend, his job and his scholarship. Nothing in the world matters anymore, until he receives a rude awakening from a stranger.
Petite and awkward, Terra Quinn is living the life with her bes...
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– Zach –
Blood isn't red; it's black, pitch black, and the floor was drenched with it. Some were mine, some weren't, and I'm not sure whose I wanted more to be spilled.
"Pathetic." Marcus snorted, spitting at the ground.
I swallowed, the metallic taste burning my throat as I gaze at the bodies that laid limp before me, bodies that could've easily been mine. My heart was thrashing violently in my chest as I crawled back and squeezed my eyes shut, summoning the little strength that remained within me to keep calm.
Don't feel.
"Are they breathing?" I asked, my voice barely audible to my own ears.
"They better be, so I can beat the shit out of them again." He smirked, stumbling as he leaned against the stained brick wall for support. I could only watch when he threw another kick at a man, his face bloody with raw bruises, swollen beyond recognition. My stomach churned and I clenched my fists.
Don't feel.
Marcus brushed his sticky hands against his jeans, casually slipping into their pockets, pulling out stacks after stacks of money that didn't belong to him, packets after packets of what a preschooler would mistake for chalk and ice.
"That's what you get for stealing from me." He hissed, tossing them into his leather bag.
"You're the one stealing." I said, then he turned to me with a twisted grin.
"I know." He laughed. "But you're clearly not going to do anything about it, since you're just as guilty."
He's right.
He's wrong.
He's right.
Would I have never gotten involved if I'd knew the methods he'd been going about to get his hands on them? Would I have turned the other way, desperately searching for alternatives again to ease what was not temporary?
He'd gone through them all, all seven bodies, drenched in what was not meant to be spilled so carelessly. I could only watch. I watched. That was all I knew to do.
"Tell me, Zach," Marcus spat, embodying a soulless human shell as I remained on the ground, cranking my sore neck to face him, "Why do you think God gave you this life?"
My jaw tensed when a stabbing sensation shot through my throbbing cheeks. I wiped the drying blood off the corner of my mouth, our eyes locked in a threatening gaze. Of all the people I'd ever known, he was the last one I'd ever want to be breathing alone with in the dead alley pass two in the morning. He was also the only one who I'd had no choice but to go after, because he had something that I could never break away from, something that was clawing onto me, piercing through my veins like the venomous teeth of a slithering cobra.
